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F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, Introduction

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F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, Introduction Introduction The FBI against and for African American Literature The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the most storied name in U.S. law en- forcement, capped its long struggle against African American protest with a homemade imitation of black prose. Late in the evening of November 20, 1964, FBI assistant director William C. Sullivan, a former English teacher who still dreamed of a professorship at a snug New England college, fed a sheet of unwatermarked paper into a worn- down, untraceable typewriter— both items were common tools of the trade within Domestic Intelligence, the Bureau divi- sion where Sullivan held sway.1 Then as now, the Bureau’s mission was twofold, to enforce U.S. federal laws and to protect U.S. national security. Inside Sulli- van’s Domestic Intelligence Division, however, security trumped law. Secretive counterintelligence, the effort to mislead enemies by mimicking or otherwise hijacking their trusted sources of information, overshadowed aboveboard crime fighting. By devoting his literary ambition to the covert art of counterin- telligence, the Irish American house intellectual nicknamed “Crazy Billy” had climbed to the number four spot in the FBI, overseeing all national security investigations within the United States. And his clout exceeded his rank. As J. Edgar Hoover’s preferred interpreter—and impersonator—of the civil rights movement, Sullivan had become the legendary FBI director’s heir apparent as a racial policeman, poised to assume command of a grimy war on so- called black hate groups. Channeling Hoover’s outrage at the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Sullivan burned midnight oil like a journalist on deadline. By the end of the night, he had transformed his carefully anony- mous sheet into a history- making poison- pen letter: King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all us Negroes. White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time that is any where [sic] near your equal. You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat that you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God and act as you do. Clearly you don’t believe in any personal moral principles. Maxwell_FBI_crc.indb 1 9/30/14 6:06 AM 2 | INTRODUCTION King, like all frauds your end is approaching. You could have been our greatest leader. We will now have to depend on our older leaders like [Roy] Wilkins a man of character and thank God we have others like him. But you are done. Your “honorary” degrees, your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done. The American public, the church organizations that have been helping— Protestants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are— an evil beast. So will others who have backed you. You are done. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do [it] (this exact number has been se- lected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significant [sic]). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation. (Sullivan to Martin Luther King Jr.) What was the “one way out” urged in Sullivan’s letter? The question was anx- iously debated by the inner circle of the Southern Christian Leadership Con- ference (SCLC) that received it in Atlanta. Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, Andrew Young, lawyer Chauncey Eskridge, and King himself gathered to inter- pret the text alongside King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. Uncomfortably enough, she had first opened a package containing both the letter and audio evidence of her husband’s extramarital affairs, a compilation tape recorded by FBI bugs planted in hotel rooms from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Some in the SCLC huddle argued that Sullivan’s unsigned message was meant to blackmail King into declining the Nobel, an honor that Hoover improbably considered his own due. Others interpreted the thirty- four- day deadline as a schedule for suicide. Everyone agreed that the letter sought more than an ugly divorce, and that only the FBI possessed the technical know-how (and the shrewd spite) to join the tape to the threat. Hoover’s eavesdroppers “are out to break me,” a depressed, unsleeping King concluded in a conversation ironically preserved by FBI phone tapping (qtd. in Garrow, Bearing 374). “They are out to get me, harass me, break my spirit” (374), he lamented, his case of the FBI blues a signal that Sullivan’s blow had come near its mark. Recent historians of the Bureau have suggested that King underestimated the scope of his tormentors’ ambition. In the emerging consensus of post- Hoover scholarship, race matters as a pivotal theme of FBI history, and Sullivan’s no- torious act of epistolary counterintelligence reflects a lengthy and comprehen- sive campaign against African American activism, not just a jealous crusade to silence the most charismatic spokesman of the civil rights generation.2 On Maxwell_FBI_crc.indb 2 9/30/14 6:06 AM INTRODUCTION | 3 this view, the nadir of FBI history reached in Sullivan’s letter took decades to prepare. The vendetta against King can be said to have begun no later than August 1919, when a twenty- something Hoover first joined the Bureau’s new Radical Division amid the bloody race riots of the “Red Summer.” Cement- ing the Bureau’s early wariness of the self- defending and stridently modern “New Negro,” the southern- born, fast- rising Hoover paved the way to King’s hounding by triggering over forty years of investigations of African Ameri- can dissent. A who’s who of black protest was spied on, often infiltrated, and sometimes formally indicted by Hoover’s FBI: among these individuals and organizations were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Ida B. Wells- Barnett and her antilynching drives; William Monroe Trotter and the National Equal Rights League; Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); the Christian pacifist Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); A. Philip Randolph and his World War II March on Washington movement; Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; Malcolm X and his breakaway Organization of Afro- American Unity (OAAU); King’s rebellious junior partners at the Student Nonviolent Coor- dinating Committee (SNCC); and black socialists and communists of every phase and faction. In short, the Hoover Bureau targeted practically the whole of the African American freedom movement starting with the first signs of the Harlem Renaissance.3 In the disillusioned judgment of Tyrone Powers, a retired black FBI agent, the Bureau’s steady aim was “to weaken and unlink the unified chain” of black self- organization, frustrating any sustained “move forward by African Americans” (367). While denying that the FBI thwarted the lawful progress of African American groups, Hoover affirmed his lasting duty to probe their contact with communists and lesser subversives. Consid- ered “from an intelligence standpoint” alone, the director informed Congress in 1964, the Bureau’s concern with radical influence on black America was obvious and permanent (J. Edgar Hoover Speaks 54). Given all this, the blunt malice of Sullivan’s letter to King looks like an artless smoking gun, final proof of the Hoover Bureau’s unswerving racism. Yet the complication of the letter’s race-passing literary artifice, its involved design to police black assertion under cover of black expression, may be just as revealing. Such literary artifice, this book argues, can indeed clarify overlooked wrinkles in the FBI’s influential history. When it comes to Sullivan’s twisted letter, the wrinkles are several. The white Sullivan’s unnamed black speaker, an embit- tered guardian of Christian morality who commands King to “look into [his] heart,” writes on behalf of “all us Negroes,” and from a location inside or sympa- thetic to the nonviolent civil rights movement, a place where Roy Wilkins of the NAACP is a trusted household name and the endorsement of the ecumenical Maxwell_FBI_crc.indb 3 9/30/14 6:06 AM 4 | INTRODUCTION spectrum assisting the movement is reckoned a strategic good. This Negro per- sona lectures King from sorrow as much as anger—“You could have been our greatest leader”— at least when not slinging accusations of Satanic evil, ham- mering out an ominous drumbeat of you are done, you are done, or honing the chilling rhetoric of the precisely timed but indistinct threat (no nonviolence promised here). Sullivan’s insider paints himself as a biblically based movement ally called to brutality only by knowledge of a preacher’s hypocrisy. “Protes- tants, Catholics and Jews will know you for what you are—an evil beast,” he forewarns, threatening King on the home field of the King James translation, where evil beasts imperil the righteous from Genesis 37:20 to Titus 1:12. By the time that King is offered “one way out,” Sullivan’s letter has blessed a number of the touchstones, religious and political, of the same black- led movement it plots to decapitate.4 What clues do the race- crossing literary gambits of Sullivan’s letter hold about the larger life of Hoover’s FBI— clues, that is, beyond the awful signs of the Bureau’s capacity to invite the death of Martin Luther King? For one, the letter’s claim to speak for “us Negroes” unveils the link between FBI counterintelligence and “American Africanism,” Toni Morrison’s name for American literature’s for- mative reliance on ventriloquized blackness (6).
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